"Europeans" is kinda broad brush. Norwegians around me had little trouble following the safety instructions.
Still not sold though that the cohesion in an small, resource constrained, artificial community can hold over a few generations. Huge risks of it degrading into some cult/dictatorship.
I don't see why smaller societies should not be able to thrive. My grandparents said once that back in the day you could identify what rural village someone was from by their accent. Meaning populations inside of villages changed very little. And most of these villages did just fine with populations as low as 200.
They all existed within the greater (regional, national) social context. There still was freedom of movement even if at much greater cost. There were avenues for delinquents and outcasts to seek fortunes in the cities or even overseas. There was no overarching purpose imposed on their life other than the religion.
This is not to say that generation ship societies are doomed to fail but chances are decent.
The real question is what stops them from declaring independence and cutting ties with Earth. Especially after generations of people? They'd need strong ... propaganda, for lack of a better word.
One of the primary causes of our cultural disfunction is our seemingly intrinsic compulsion to separate ourselves into groups of Us and Them, and have no limit to the amount of disparaging, scorn, and dehumanization we are willing to dump onto Them.
Covid went really well in all the intellectual bastions of liberal democracy right? NYC, SF? California famously no downsides from their policy choices at all.
And then to top it off, you compare response to China - the government that lied through it's teeth about covid from the beginning, jailed journalists and destroyed evidence.
Oh, nobody managed Covid well. The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good.
New York is a bad example to call out since it was one of the first places to get hit, locked down hard after a delay, and yet came out with lower per-capita deaths and a stronger economy than most red states. (Speaking as someone who lives in one of the reddest states in the union.)
Maybe the issue is that people assume that a randomly selected population would consist of US citizens. What if you picked Japanese? They did well during covid. An they are know for having a strong communal responsibility. Maybe the average US citizen is just a bad choice for a generation ship? Then again given the choice between sending foreign citizen's or sending no generation ship would probably result in no generation ship bring launched.
People from latin america might be a good match - last time the fleet of generation ships not only reached the destination in sufficient number, but one of them even ahead of schedule[0]!
> The question is "Could we create a cadre of 400 highly effective people that could sustain a colony on a spaceship?"
For a generational ship, the question becomes even more complex because you would have to build a culture of expertise that can sustain itself over multiple generations.
> The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good.
COVID didn't test for capacity to sacrifice for the common good. Sacrifice is voluntary. It tested for capacity to submit to authoritarian control for the common good.
Rural Americans couldn’t. But I don’t see anyone proposing we put high school dropouts and polio patients in space.
China, India and Japan managed to pass that test just fine. I imagine one of the former two will be the first to colonise deep space.